The Religious Affiliation of American Revolutionary and WriterThomas Paine

Thomas Paine was an important American revolutionary and writer. He was raised as a Quaker but was a Deist as an adult.

From: R.P. Nettelhorst, "Notes on the Founding Fathers and the Separation of Church and State", posted on Quartz Hill School of Theology website (http://www.theology.edu/journal/volume2/ushistor.htm; viewed 30 November 2005):

Thomas Paine was a pamphleteer whose manifestoes encouraged the faltering spirits of the country and aided materially in winning the War of Independence. But he was a Deist:

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church. (Richard Emery Roberts, ed. "Excerpts from The Age of Reason". Selected Writings of Thomas Paine. New York: Everbody's Vacation Publishing Co., 1945, p. 362)

Regarding the New Testament, he wrote that:

I hold [it] to be fabulous and have shown [it] to be false...(Roberts, p. 375)

About the afterlife, he wrote:

I do not believe because a man and a woman make a child that it imposes on the Creator the unavoidable obligation of keeping the being so made in eternal existance hereafter. It is in His power to do so, or not to do so, and it is not in my power to decide which He will do. (Roberts, p. 375)

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